Last Call For Betsy Flunks The Test

Trump Regime Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did not acquit herself well on 60 Minutes tonight when it came to defending the Trump approach to "school choice" in her home state of Michigan.

Lesley Stahl: Why take away money from that school that's not working, to bring them up to a level where they are-- that school is working?

Betsy DeVos: Well, we should be funding and investing in students, not in school-- school buildings, not in institutions, not in systems.

Lesley Stahl: Okay. But what about the kids who are back at the school that's not working? What about those kids?

Betsy DeVos: Well, in places where there have been-- where there is-- a lot of choice that's been introduced-- Florida, for example, the-- studies show that when there's a large number of students that opt to go to a different school or different schools, the traditional public schools actually-- the results get better, as well.

Lesley Stahl: Now, has that happened in Michigan? We're in Michigan. This is your home state.

Betsy DeVos: Michi--Yes, well, there's lots of great options and choices for students here.

Lesley Stahl: Have the public schools in Michigan gotten better?

Betsy DeVos: I don't know. Overall, I-- I can't say overall that they have all gotten better.

Lesley Stahl: The whole state is not doing well.

Betsy DeVos: Well, there are certainly lots of pockets where this-- the students are doing well and--

Lesley Stahl: No, but your argument that if you take funds away that the schools will get better, is not working in Michigan where you had a huge impact and influence over the direction of the school system here.

Betsy DeVos: I hesitate to talk about all schools in general because schools are made up of individual students attending them.

Lesley Stahl: The public schools here are doing worse than they did.

Betsy DeVos: Michigan schools need to do better. There is no doubt about it.

Lesley Stahl: Have you seen the really bad schools? Maybe try to figure out what they're doing?

Betsy DeVos: I have not-- I have not-- I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.

Lesley Stahl: Maybe you should.

Betsy DeVos: Maybe I should. Yes.

DeVos is the only Cabinet secretary protected by a squad of U.S. Marshals because she's gotten death threats. She's frequently met by protesters who accuse her of pushing an elitist agenda.

She often manages to offend, as when she called historically black colleges and universities "pioneers" of "school choice" – as though they had a choice.

At this commencement speech at Bethune-Cookman University, students booed and turned their backs to her.

Lesley Stahl: Why have you become, people say, the most hated Cabinet secretary?

Betsy DeVos: I'm not so sure exactly how that happened. But I think there are a lot of really powerful forces allied against change.

Lesley Stahl: Does it hurt?

Betsy DeVos: Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does. Again, I think-- I think--

Lesley Stahl: Do you ever say--

Betsy DeVos: --I'm more misunderstood than anything.

Of all the Trump cabinet secretaries, DeVos is second only to Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the sheer amount of damage she's doing to the country, particularly to people of color.  Naturally if given a choice, people want to send their kids to the best schools, but all DeVos's plan is doing is taking money out of public schools and putting it in the pockets of "education reform" companies, opening charter schools across the country that are nothing but huge scams.

Oh, and there's the issue of DeVos's brother, Erik Prince, and his involvement in Trump's foreign fundraising and how DeVos ended up with this job when she's clearly unqualified for it.

There's no way DeVos should have this job, but she does.

Trump Cards, Con't

Trump's hour-plus long rally in Pennsylvania last night for GOP candidate Rick Saccone Donald Trump went as how all the other Trump rallies go here in the era of permanent cult of personality.

The trip was ostensibly an effort to help Republicans stave off a deflating defeat in a western Pennsylvania congressional district that President Trump won by 20 points.

And in a rally at Pittsburgh’s airport on Saturday evening, Mr. Trump did mention the Republican running in Tuesday’s special election, Rick Saccone, a handful of times. A good man, he called him.

But for almost all of his 75-minute performance in front of a raucous crowd packed into a hangar, it was in-his-element Trump, vintage 2016: rambling and fiery, boastful and jocular — the part of being president that he loves perhaps the most.

Ricocheting off the teleprompter, the president showed the kind of free-flowing attitude that his aides have said they expect to see this year. He ticked off what he said were his achievements — some coming just in recent days — on a laundry list of issues like North Korea, trade and the economy, and attacked his predecessors for their failures on the same.

He spoke admiringly of foreign laws imposing the death penalty on drug dealers, and seemed to brush aside the notion of due process as he spoke of American officers grabbing gang members “by the neck” and throwing them in the paddy wagon.

He derided past presidents as stiffs and lousy entertainers. He pummeled his favorite targets: Democrats and the “fake” news media. And, always the showman, he dropped a bit of news, revealing the slogan for his 2020 re-election campaign:

Keep America Great. With an exclamation mark, he said.

Trump loves running for president.  He hates actually having to do the job.

Steve M. argues (successfully, in my opinion) that if Clinton had won in 2016, Trump would have spent the last sixteen months on the trail for 2020.

The GOP/right-wing media complex would have gone into a stance of maximum resistance to Clinton -- or maybe just short of maximum. (Would Republicans in Congress have refused to certify her election? I think they'd have stopped just short of that.) She'd be the subject of multiple investigations and a lot of impeachment talk. Republicans might not want Trump as a figurehead, but he'd simply designate himself as the key player in this effort, and the media would lavish attention on his efforts.

He'd hold rally after rally. Hillary-hating Republicans would join him. Even non-Fox news organizations would be obsessed with Clinton's alleged misdeeds, while ignoring most other news. The Trump rallies would play unedited on cable. They'd ensure that Trump remained the most popular politician in America among Republican voters.

And since there'd never be a good reason to impeach Clinton, or 67 votes to convict her in the Senate, and since incumbents are routinely renominated even when they're struggling in the polls, it's likely that the 2020 election would have been a contest between the incumbent and the Republican base's favorite candidate, a man so fond if campaigning he'd be in the process of doing it nonstop for more than five years.

We could have had an electoral rerun in 2020. And given the likelihood that Clinton would have had four years of bad press, while Trump would have been, in an awful way, a media darling, I think he could have won outright the second time.

We'll never know if that would have been the case, but I honestly believe the urge by Trump voters to not just punish but to completely obliterate the Obama/Clinton coalition in 2020 would be, in this scenario, absolute.

And yes, our lovely media would have made sure that the Trump Show would be playing in 2020. 

Sunday Long Read: Chalk One Up For The Ladies

This week's Sunday Long Read takes us to the dimly-lit pool halls of San Francisco, where the game is nine-ball and the action is as smooth as the shots are glorious.  But the players here are all women, and the skill level is remarkable as they compete for a spot in the Vegas big time.

Renée Mata is a 4-foot-11 ball of irrepressible good vibes. She never stops grinning and stops talking only slightly more often. So when she takes a break from shooting pool one Saturday morning in mid-January to tell me, still smiling, that she’s “in a funk,” I honestly can’t tell if she’s joking.

Thirty-year-old Mata (Ren, to her friends) is one of 30 women at Billiard Palacade, a dark pool hall in Balboa Park, one of the last ungentrified neighborhoods in San Francisco, and there’s nowhere she’d rather be. But the funk is very real: she didn’t get much sleep last night because she didn’t get home from work—pouring beers and cooking hot dogs at another pool hall six miles uptown—until 2:30 a.m., and her shift had been so busy that she didn’t get much time to practice her game. That same day had begun with a 6:30 a.m. baking class at the City College of San Francisco, where she learned how to make pot de crème. Now it’s time to compete at the penultimate stop in what may be the most competitive regional women’s pool tour in the country.

“These girls are all my friends, but they’re also crazy good pool players,” Mata tells me, fresh off a streak of eight consecutive hugs with her competitors. “So if I’m not on top of my game because I didn’t get enough sleep or didn’t eat right or didn’t have a good practice session last night, I’m going to have a rough day.”

The event is the eighth stop in the West Coast Women’s Tour, a series with monthly events across Northern California. The tour focuses on nine-ball billiards, in which players must use the cue ball to strike the lowest-numbered of the nine balls on the table. Top performers will qualify for the annual American Poolplayers Association Championships in Las Vegas in August, and several of the regulars travel widely for bigger competitions. But the California tour is not just for elite players—the women at Billiard Palacade range in age from their teens to their 70s, and the spread of skill levels is at least as wide. A handicap system encourages women of all abilities to participate: the pro player who cofounded the event in 2007 has to win eight games to win a match, while newbies must win just five.

Mata falls somewhere in the middle. For the past five years, her life has revolved around pool. She quit her job managing a Bay Area Target store when she convinced the owner of her favorite pool hall to hire her, so she practices nearly every day at work. She plays in a team league as well as on the women’s tour. When she was a kid, her dad loved watching pool on TV, and she dreamed of playing professionally, too. But the only pool halls near their home were inappropriate for little girls—so she didn’t start playing regularly until she was 23, when her brother’s girlfriend asked her to join her team. She wasn’t very good, she admits, but her drive to improve was insatiable. “[My brother’s girlfriend] says she created a monster by inviting me to play,” Mata says. She’s not sure she wants to go pro, but she’s working toward bigger tournaments, like the one in Vegas. And while she has the talent to beat almost any player in Northern California, she’s inconsistent, so starting a tournament in a funk does not bode well.

Because pool is a mental game, the atmosphere during a tournament is generally silent but for the crash of cue balls striking the other nine. As the women twist cues together and run precision-shooting drills, Mata’s voice and laugh are among the few sounds that slice through the quiet. I hadn’t recognized her when I first spotted her across the room: during her shift two nights earlier, four piercings (two in her nose and two below her lip) had been her only facial adornment. Today, aware that a photographer is coming, she’s in full makeup, with dramatic cat-eye eyeliner and pink, glittery eye shadow that matches the highlights in her black hair. The second-shortest player in the tournament, she has to stand on tiptoe to make many of her shots, and she has found one of the few chairs in the room that will allow her feet to reach the floor when she sits down.

Two days earlier, Mata told me that she thinks of this particular tournament as more of a fun time than a competition—“This is my girls’ weekend, with no boyfriends or men at all”—but make no mistake: she is here for a prize. When the draw is announced and players move to their assigned tables, even the bubbliest player in the room goes mum, the smile suddenly gone from her face. She jams in a pair of white earbuds, turns on a playlist that ranges from Demi Lovato to Childish Gambino, and racks the balls into the diamond shape that begins a game of nine-ball. As the tournament begins, six 20-something men who have just walked in look crestfallen: the women are using all 15 tables, so there’s no room for them to play.

Women of all ages, from all walks of life play here, for the love of the game, for the challenge of competition, and just to prove a point.  But that doesn't always go over well with men in the sport, or at the halls, and even in 2018, billiards is still a "macho guy thing".

These women are looking to change that, and more power to them.

Chasing The Dropouts

A group of political scientists make the mathematical case in the NY Times that Democrats would be far better served winning back the more than four million Obama voters who stayed home in 2016 (rather than voting for Hillary or anyone) than the six million Obama voters who abandoned the Democrats for Trump.

Before the 2016 election, these voters were often identified as part of the “rising American electorate” by Democratic strategists who hoped that demographic shifts would be a boon to the party. But these shifts are meaningless if Democrats can’t get enough young people of color to the polls.

What do Obama-to-nonvoters prefer, policy-wise? Are they more similar to Obama-to-Clinton voters or to Obama-to-Trump voters? The answers to these questions have important implications for the future of Democratic Party politics, so we analyzed the preferences of all three groups of voters across a broad range of domestic policy areas, including support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, abortion rights, E.P.A. regulation of carbon emissions, cuts in domestic spending, an increase in the minimum wage, and an end to mandatory minimums in criminal sentencing, as well as opposition to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Two clear patterns emerged. First, it will come as no surprise that Obama-to-Trump voters adopt the most conservative positions. In fact, Obama-to-Trump voters express the most conservative views of any Obama voters in each of the seven areas examined in this analysis.

Second, the preferences of Obama-to-nonvoters are almost always closer to the preferences of Obama-to-Clinton voters than they are to Obama-to-Trump voters. For example, nearly three-quarters of Obama-to-Trump voters supported repeal of the A.C.A., while less than half of Obama-to-nonvoters did. The extremely high degree of support for repeal of the A.C.A. among Obama-to-Trump voters clearly played a role in the 2016 election and in the negative reaction to Mr. Obama among this group of voters more broadly. However, considering how strongly Obama-to-Clinton voters in particular favor the A.C.A., it is hard to imagine how Democrats could incorporate anti-A.C.A. voters into future Democratic coalitions.

Obama-to-nonvoters are most similar to Obama-to-Clinton voters on the minimum wage, though the proposal draws strong majority support from Obama-to-Trump voters as well. Obama-to-Trump voters are most out of line with the Democratic coalition on issues relating to race and gender. They are less supportive of a path to citizenship, and a supermajority (64 percent) of Obama-to-Trump voters support deporting undocumented immigrants. At 72 percent, Obama-to-nonvoters are also far more in favor of abortion rights than Obama-to-Trump voters are (55 percent). Over all, Obama-to-nonvoters are quite close to the emerging Democratic consensus on issues of class, race, gender and the environment.

Democratic strategists should recognize that Obama-to-Trump voters do not represent the future of their party. Obama-to-Trump voters diverge from the Democratic Party on many core issues, and in any case they are not particularly loyal Democrats: Less than one third of Obama-to-Trump voters supported Democrats down-ballot in 2016, and only 37 percent identify as Democrats.

In stark contrast, Obama-to-nonvoters share the progressive policy priorities of Democrats, and they strongly identify with the Democratic Party. Four out of every five Obama-to-nonvoters identify as Democrats, and 83 percent reported they would have voted for a Democrat down-ballot. A similar share of Obama-to-nonvoters said that they would have voted for Mrs. Clinton had they turned out to vote. In short, while reclaiming some Obama-to-Trump voters would be a big help to Democratic prospects, re-energizing 2012 Obama voters who stayed home is a more plausible path for the party going forward.

Whether Democrats can mobilize these voters is an open question, however. Significantly, only 43 percent of Obama-to-nonvoters reported being contacted by a candidate in 2016, compared with 66 percent of Obama-to-Clinton voters. While analysts have focused on why many conservative voters switched to the Republican Party, a better question might be why a campaign that sought to energize young voters of color failed to do so. That’s the question that will decide the future of American politics.

Getting these voters to the polls on Election Day is the most important task for progressives. And given their outlook on the important issues of the day, Obama-to-nonvoters are also likely to be easier to mobilize after two years of a Trump presidency — never mind four.

Two observations here:  First, the "Obama dropouts" here are overwhelmingly voters of color.  More than a third of them are black, that represents 1.5 million voters, another 10 percent were Latino, another 450,000.

Second: these are the voters who were pushed out of the electorate by the GOP through Republican voter suppression efforts in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, and more.  More than two dozen states enacted Republican voter ID laws between 2012 and 2016, and we now know that Russian election meddling through social media specifically targeted black voters in swing states to demoralize them.  The combination cost Clinton millions of votes and the presidency.

So yes, getting these younger voters back should be top priority rather than older, more conservative voters who left the Democrats over "identity politics" and showed their true colors by voting for Trump.  The Democrats don't need them.  They do need the younger voters who were by and large pushed out of the electorate.

It's Mueller TIme, Con't

Robert Mueller is closing in on Donald Trump, and we know this because the Trump regime is offering to make Mueller a completely ludicrous deal where Trump allows Mueller to interview him if Mueller does something, you know, completely reasonable and ends the investigation.

Attorneys for President Trump are reportedly considering asking special counsel Robert Mueller to set a hard end date for his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election as one of the preconditions for an interview with president.

While Trump's lawyers remain split on the terms of such a deal, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, they also want Mueller to agree to parameters on the scope of such an interview.

One idea being floated is that Mueller would agree to wrap up the probe within 60 days of interviewing Trump.

Conversations between Mueller and Trump’s attorneys are reportedly only just beginning. Trump has said he is "looking forward" to speaking with the special counsel's team, but his lawyers have repeatedly emphasized that he would only agree under certain conditions.

Legal experts interviewed by the Journal expressed skepticism Mueller would agree to the idea.

“You can’t put a timeline on these things,” said former federal prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg. “Someone could walk in the door on the day before their proposed deadline and say, ‘I’ve got some information that’s going to blow your minds.’ … [And] Mueller’s going to say, ‘Oh, too bad, the deadline’s tomorrow?’”

Nobody on earth thinks this is a reasonable deal in any way.  This is Trump's starting point for negotiations, then Mueller should hang up.  He's got more than enough on Trump anyway. So what sparked this "attempt" at cutting a deal?  My guess is the testimony of Sam Nunberg before a grand jury today which lasted several hours made Trump sweat bullets.

A former Trump campaign aide appeared for hours before a federal grand jury Friday, after he defiantly insisted in a series of news interviews just days earlier that he intended to defy a subpoena in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

Sam Nunberg spent more than six hours inside the federal courthouse in Washington. He declined to speak with journalists on the way in or out of the building, and it was not immediately clear what testimony he offered to the grand jury or what documents he provided.

His appearance marked a turnabout from extraordinary public statements Monday when Nunberg, in multiple interviews, balked at complying with a subpoena that sought his appearance before the grand jury as well as correspondence with other campaign officials. In doing so, he became the first witness in the Mueller probe to openly threaten to defy a subpoena.

But later that night, Nunberg, who initially suggested that he considered Mueller's document demands unreasonable, told The Associated Press he had relented and predicted he'd wind up complying after all.

"I'm going to end up cooperating with them," he said.

Nunberg said he worked for hours to produce the thousands of emails and other communications requested by Mueller, who is investigating whether Donald Trump's campaign improperly coordinated with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

"I thought it was a teachable moment," he said of his 24 hours in the limelight.

Nunberg is Roger Stone's boy through and through, and my guess is that he gave up Stone lock, stock and two smoking barrels.  And if Roger Stone is now facing his turn in the dock, Trump has to be terrified.

Scared enough to start offering deals.  After all, if there's nothing to discuss with Mueller, and Trump did nothing, there's no reason to answer any of Mueller's questions.  Trump even offering that he's willing to negotiate means he knows things are going to get a lot worse and soon.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For Nixon In The Bunker

Donald Trump isn't talking to paintings yet, but as Gabe Sherman of Vanity Fair tells us, he's decided that the problem is everyone in the White House who isn't him, and it's time to take out the trash.

With the departures of Hope Hicks and Gary Cohn, the Trump presidency is entering a new phase—one in which Trump is feeling liberated to act on his impulses. “Trump is in command. He’s been in the job more than a year now. He knows how the levers of power work. He doesn’t give a fuck,” the Republican said. Trump’s decision to circumvent the policy process and impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum reflects his emboldened desire to follow his impulses and defy his advisers. “It was like a fuck-you to Kelly,” a Trump friend said. “Trump is red-hot about Kelly trying to control him.” 

According to five Republicans close to the White House, Trump has diagnosed the problem as having the wrong team around him and is looking to replace his senior staff in the coming weeks. “Trump is going for a clean reset, but he needs to do it in a way that’s systemic so it doesn’t look like it’s chaos,” one Republican said. 

Sources said that the first officials to go will be Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom Trump has clashed with for months. On Tuesday, Trump met with John Bolton in the Oval Office. When he plans to visit Mar-a-Lago this weekend, Trump is expected to interview more candidates for both positions, according to two sources. “He’s going for a clean slate,” one source said. Cohn had been lobbying to replace Kelly as chief, two sources said, and quit when he didn’t get the job. “Trump laughed at Gary when he brought it up,” one outside adviser to the White House said. (The White House declined to comment.) 

Next on the departure list are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Trump remains fiercely loyal to his family, but various distractions have eroded their efficacy within the administration. Both have been sidelined without top-secret security clearances by Kelly, and sources expect them to be leaving at some point in the near future. One scenario being discussed is that Kushner would return to New York to oversee Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign with his ally Brad Parscale, who was hand-selected by the Trump family. One Trump friend referred to it as a “soft landing.” Ivanka will likely stay on longer, perhaps through the summer, before decamping home to New York to enroll the children in a Manhattan private school. Both are presumed to remain in close contact with Trump, who often places significant value on the opinions expressed outside his administration, anyway.

I'll believe it when I see it, but if Trump has decided he can now do whatever he wants to and will no longer even pretend to listen to anyone but himself, the chances that he fails catastrophically are extremely high.  Good news for Democrats in November, bad news for America and everyone living there. 

If this is all true, then we're already seeing "nothing to lose" Trump in action with North Korea and trade tariffs, and at this point if Trump figures he takes a big enough gamble he can avoid the Mueller axe by making a big enough move to win everyone over and save the GOP, who will then be so grateful to him that they will end the investigations.

The reality is that Trump will come ever closer to making a fatal miscalculation that could pretty much wreck everything.  If he's listening to people like John Bolton's Mustache, we're all in for a world of hurt.

We'll see.

Soccer It To Me, Cincy, Con't

The saga of FC Cincinnati's new stadium needed to secure its place as an MLS expansion team got very interesting this week as Ohio's existing MLS team, the Columbus Crew, is looking for the exits to send the team to Austin but is running headlong into the Modell Law.

Columbus Crew SC majority owner Anthony Precourt's focus is now zeroed in on one site for a Major League Soccerstadium in Austin, Texas. 

Precourt, CEO of Precourt Sports Venture, wants to move the team to Austin and announced Thursday afternoon he would focus his efforts on Austin-owned McKalla Place. 

The site is nowhere near downtown Austin, where Precourt said he wanted a stadium. He has asked for a Downtown stadium in Columbus, too, having said Mapfre Stadium north of Columbus is too far away. 

While the site selection is good news for Austin soccer fans, it is yet another blow to #SaveTheCrew efforts to keep the team in Columbus, where Precourt's company and Major League Soccer are being sued to keep the team from moving. 

On Wednesday, Precourt and MLS officials issued a statement saying they were disappointed in the city of Columbus and the state for filing a suit on Monday to keep the Crew SC from moving to Austin. The city and state are citing the "Art Modell Law," which was named for the then-Browns owner who relocated the NFL team to Baltimore in 1996. 

The law says that owners whose teams use tax-supported facilities and accept financial assistance from the state are prohibited from moving to another city unless they give at least six months' notice and give individuals who live in the area an opportunity to purchase the team. 

On Thursday, Precourt said he is still interested in having his team "integrate into the heart and soul of the Austin community." 

"We’ve heard the concerns about a possible site for a stadium," Precourt said. "Soccer is inclusive and celebratory, so we want to shift the focus onto the long-term benefits of a location that works for everybody."

This is the real reason MLS is putting its expansion plans on hold for now, they want to know where the Crew will end up.  If the Crew leave Columbus and Cincy is passed over, MLS is going to lose a lot of loyal fans in a hurry in arguably one of the best areas in the country for soccer.

Meanwhile, FC Cincinnati's new stadium may not actually be in Ohio at all.

Northern Kentucky business and government leaders will schmooze with FC Cincinnati representatives Friday afternoon an in effort to woo the soccer team's new stadium.

Cleared land for the yet-to-start Ovation development next to the confluence of the Ohio and Licking Rivers in Newport is a possible location to build a stadium. The property has a clear view of Downtown Cincinnati. 

FC Cincinnati's president and general manager Jeff Berding and Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce president Brent Cooper will spend the afternoon touring nonprofits in Covington and Newport, according to a chamber release. 

Berding and Cooper will be joined by Eric Rose of Newport Aquarium, Newport Mayor Jerry Peluso, Hofbrauhaus Newport co-owner and Fort Thomas Mayor Eric Haas, MeetNKY convention and visitors bureau's Eric Summe, and Alex Perkins and Gaby Batshoun of Global Business Solutions.

The NKY Chamber is tripping over itself to get FC Cincinnati to agree to a deal that'll put the stadium in Newport by the levee.  The current plan to put the stadium in the West End is getting a lot of pushback from residents, and rightfully so.

We'll see where all this goes, but it may be a long time before this one gets sorted out.  If you had hopes for FC Cincinnati to join MLS before 2021 or 2022 at the earliest, I wouldn't go printing the t-shirts just yet.

Donny's Pyongyang Adventure

The North Korean regime has been trying to invite a US president to Pyongyang for direct talks for two decades now in order to prove to the world that its nuclear program is powerful enough to bring even the leader of the free world to its doorstep to negotiate as the regime's equal on North Korea's terms.  

Clinton, Dubya, and Obama all passed on such an obvious diplomatic trap that would accomplish nothing but upside for the Kim regime and establish a new diplomatic paradigm that the world should be coming to Pyongyang directly at its whim.

No major world leader would be blockheaded enough to give the North Koreans exactly what they wanted: proof that their nuclear program is absolutely justified as a tool to get America and the western world to the table and assure to the rest of the planet that a nuclear program is exactly what your tinpot dictatorship needs in order to get respect on the global stage.

So guess what goddamn idiot Donald Trump announced he was going to do this spring.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has invited President Trump to meet for negotiations over its nuclear program, an audacious diplomatic overture that would bring together two strong-willed, idiosyncratic leaders who have traded threats of war.

The White House said that Mr. Trump had accepted the invitation, and Chung Eui-yong, a South Korean official who conveyed it, told reporters that the president would meet with Mr. Kim within two months.

“He expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible,” Mr. Chung said at the White House on Thursday evening after meeting the president. Mr. Trump, he said, agreed to “meet Kim Jong-un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”

The president expressed his optimism about the meeting in a post on Twitter, saying that Mr. Kim had “talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze.”

“Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time,” Mr. Trump added. “Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!”

Mr. Chung, whose talks with Mr. Kim on Monday in Pyongyang resulted in the invitation, noted that the North Korean leader said he understood that joint military exercises with the United States and South Korea would go ahead as scheduled after the end of the Paralympic Games this month.

For Mr. Trump, a meeting with Mr. Kim, a leader he has threatened with “fire and fury” and has derided as “Little Rocket Man,” is a breathtaking gamble. No sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader, and Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly vowed that he would not commit the error of his predecessors by being drawn into a protracted negotiation in which North Korea extracted concessions from the United States but held on to key elements of its nuclear program.

Meeting Mr. Kim now, rather than at the end of a negotiation when the United States would presumably have extracted concessions from North Korea, is an enormous gesture by the president. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim share a penchant for bold, dramatic moves, and their personal participation in a negotiation could take it in unexpected directions.

Sure, those "unexpected directions" include "going completely off the rails with a nuclear adversary". The rank amateurism and sheer stupidity of the agreement cannot be overstated, as Ankit Panda explains.

For Kim, a meeting with Trump will be an unalloyed propaganda victory. Trump will assuredly not “achieve permanent denuclearization,” despite what he told Chung. Instead, Kim will be given the opportunity to stage-manage a photo-op with a U.S. president. The costs of a freeze in nuclear and ballistic missile testing for the next two months are relatively minor for North Korea compared to the benefits of a meeting with Trump.

In a normal world, too, there could be a serious opportunity in direct leader-level talks between the United States and North Korea, but Trump is far from a normal president. The United States is woefully lacking in subject matter expertise on the Korean Peninsula at the highest levels of government, with the State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy, Joseph Yun, having just stepped down last week and the post of ambassador to Seoul still vacant. Trump has the intelligence community behind him, but it’s doubtful that he’s capable of being successfully briefed.

A face-to-face meeting with Kim would require Trump to exercise cautious, measured engagement. He’d have to hear out what the North Korean leader has to say and know where the red lines lie. North Korea’s long-term play on the Korean Peninsula is to “decouple” the United States and South Korea.

During his campaign for the presidency, Trump showed more interest in sitting down for a “hamburger” with Kim than he did in the alliance with South Korea, complaining about the costs of maintaining a forward-based military presence there. Those instincts still live within Trump and are ripe for exploitation by North Korea, which has had plenty of time to study him.

Trump has shown time and again a deep misunderstanding of the basic rules of statecraft (as well as economics, physics, and pretty damn well near everything else.)  The odds of him getting rolled by Kim like a drunk bum at an Staten Island policemen's ball are approaching 199%.  Disaster doesn't begin to cover it.

But, much like the GOP tax bill, the dismantling of Obamacare, and the new trade war ignited by Trump's steel and Aluminum tariffs, the effects of this catastrophe won't be fully felt until it's far too late for the next person in the White House to even begin to clean it up.

StupidiNews!

• Mississippi GOP Gov. Phil Bryant is expected to sign a Republican bill to prevent women from getting abortions after just 15 weeks of pregnancy, a major court challenge is expected.
• The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has been selected to hear the consolidated legal challenges to the FCC ending "net neutrality" regulations, 22 states are suing the Trump regime over the move.
• Republicans in Pennsylvania will head to court today to block the congressional redistricting map created by the state Supreme Court after the current map was found to be unconstitutional.
• The Obamas could be heading to Netflix as the former president and first lady are in talks with the streaming giant to produce original shows. 
• Oakland, California is looking at ways to tax ride-share services like Uber and Lyft with a per-ride fee to help pay for infrastructure and road repairs.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Republicans are trying to motivate their voters in Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district' special election the way they always do nationally, complain about everything and use fear of scary liberals and playing the victim card in order to get people to turn out, especially if they expect to lose the race.

Tuesday’s special election, which is being held in a district President Donald Trump won by 20 percentage points, has emerged as the latest testing ground of whether Republicans are headed for a midterm bloodbath. A loss would be wholly embarrassing, many Republicans privately acknowledge, given that it would take place in a state that Trump made a cornerstone of his 2016 victory. And the themes that the GOP has highlighted in the special election — namely tax cuts and opposition to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are the centerpieces of the party’s 2018 campaign plan. 

But as election day grows closer, the national GOP is increasingly pinning the blame on Saccone. In interviews with nearly two dozen administration officials, senior House Republicans and top party strategists, Saccone was nearly universally panned as a deeply underwhelming candidate who leaned excessively on the national party to execute a massive, multimillion-dollar rescue effort. It was complete with visits from the president, vice president and several Cabinet members. 

They describe a candidate who largely ignored pleas to raise the money he needed, who blindsided the White House and the national party with his choice of a political strategist, and whose amateur-style social media feed included low-quality videos of him at a local bar and yukking it up with Santa. To make matters worse, Saccone is up against a Democratic rival the party could hardly have engineered had it tried: Conor Lamb, an Ivy League-educated 33-year-old Marine veteran and former federal prosecutor. 

Lamb has used a nearly $4 million war chest to cast himself as independent of his party, airing slickly produced TV ads underscoring his aversion to Pelosi and his fondness for shooting machine guns. He has a campaign staff of 16 full-time employees, compared with just four for Saccone. 

“Candidate quality matters, and when one candidate outraises the other 5-to-1, that creates real challenges for outside groups trying to win a race,” said Corry Bliss, who oversees the principal House GOP-aligned super PAC, which has conducted an expansive TV and field deployment effort aimed at pushing Saccone over the top.

Now, I know why this story was written ahead of Tuesday's contest, if Saccone loses, the story establishes clearly that the blame is on him and him alone, he's a bad candidate, the GOP itself is "fine".  You know, just like Roy Moore's loss in Alabama.

But if Saccone survives, it will be because national Republicans -- and Trump's campaign stop on Saturday -- saved him.  Heads Trump is off the hook for "sad loser" Saccone's loss, tails, Trump is a genius for rescuing his campaign.

Now, you don't do this unless there's a good chance that you're going to lose, it's too cynical and self-defeating otherwise.  But this is a district that Trump won by 20 points less than 18 months ago.  There's no way it should be close at all.

Trump's already lost, and he knows it.

Could The WV Teachers' Strike Come To KY?

West Virginia teachers across the state shut down schools for over a week and earned a 5% raise from state legislators as teachers in the state are among the nation's lowest-paid.  Now as GOP Gov Matt Bevin and Republicans in Kentucky's General Assembly put teachers here in a vice with a new pension bill that will wreck state employees' health care plans and make steep cuts to teacher pay and benefits, Kentucky teachers are looking next door for inspiration.

Teachers in eight Kentucky counties will hold “walk-in” rallies Thursday morning to protest a Senate bill that cuts teacher retirement benefits in an effort to fix Kentucky’s ailing pension systems. 

“Promises were made to us by the commonwealth, and those promises need to be kept by the commonwealth,” said Erin Grace, a teacher at Rockcastle County High School and the president of Rockcastle County Education Association. “We need, as a state, to treat funding for our schools, the services our kids need and the people who devote their working lives to providing those services as a top priority, not as a burden.” 

Teachers and other school employees will gather outside 28 schools, then walk into the building while voicing their opposition to Senate Bill 1 in Clark, Franklin, Garrard, Lincoln, Montgomery, Rockcastle and Woodford counties and Danville Independent School District. Montgomery County teachers will also hold rallies after school. 

“I hope they walk in every day and teach our kids,” said House Speaker Pro Tempore David Osborne, R-Prospect. 

The joke of course is that Kentucky state lawmakers like Dave Osborne are only in session for 90 days every two years.  Humor, we have it here in the Bluegrass.

The rallies come amid a national movement for teachers. In West Virginia, teachers in all 55 counties went on a strike last month that lasted for more than week before the legislature approved a 5 percent pay increase for public employees. Teachers in Oklahoma have said they are considering a strike over teacher pay and school funding as well. 

When asked if he was worried about the prospect of a teachers strike Wednesday, Gov. Matt Bevin said any opposition to the pension bill was “ill-informed.” 

“The reality is, I’m saving the pension system,” Bevin said. “If they are upset about it, it’s either they are ill-informed or willfully blind…I think the vast majority of teachers are none of the above. They are very aware of the fact that they want the pension. Their leadership has their reason for fomenting things. God bless them. But I’m still going to save the pension whether they like it or not.”

We have to burn down the state employees' pension system in order to save it.  I think it's going to take a statewide strike in order to get Bevin and Osborne to do much of anything.

I wonder who's going to save Bevin's job in 2019 though?

We may have to burn it down in order to save it, you know.

Russian to Judgment, Con't

Three developments overnight in the ongoing Trump/Russia investigation, the first is a follow-up to yesterday's story involving a secret meeting in the Seychelles between Blackwater founder Erik Prince, brother to now Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Russian investors, brokered by a UAE adviser to Moscow named George Nader.  

Turns out that Robert Mueller knows all about that meeting because Nader is cooperating with Mueller's team, and that means there was far more to this January 2017 meeting than just a friendly chat.  We now know what that additional info is and what Nader is providing: it was a secret attempt at a backchannel between Trump and Putin and Nader was a witness to it all.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has gathered evidence that a secret meeting in Seychelles just before the inauguration of Donald Trump was an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin — apparently contradicting statements made to lawmakers by one of its participants, according to people familiar with the matter.

In January 2017, Erik Prince, the founder of the private security company Blackwater, met with a Russian official close to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and later described the meeting to congressional investigators as a chance encounter that was not a planned discussion of U.S.-Russia relations.

A witness cooperating with Mueller has told investigators the meeting was set up in advance so that a representative of the Trump transition could meet with an emissary from Moscow to discuss future relations between the countries, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

George Nader, a Lebanese American businessman who helped organize and attended the Seychelles meeting, has testified on the matter before a grand jury gathering evidence about discussions between the Trump transition team and emissaries of the Kremlin, as part of Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.

Nader began cooperating with Mueller after he arrived at Dulles International Airport in mid-January and was stopped, served with a subpoena and questioned by the FBI, these people said. He has met numerous times with investigators. 

Last year, Prince told lawmakers — and the news media — that his Seychelles meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian government-controlled wealth fund, was an unplanned, unimportant encounter that came about by chance because he happened to be at a luxury hotel in the Indian Ocean island nation with officials from the United Arab Emirates.
In his statements, Prince has specifically denied reporting by The Washington Post that said the Seychelles meeting, which took place about a week before Trump’s inauguration, was described by U.S., European and Arab officials as part of an effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming administration.

It also means that Prince lied to Congress straight up about the meeting when he testified.  Perjury is the kind of thing that puts you in federal prison.  Remember, Republicans impeached and attempted to remove Bill Clinton from office over his perjury.  We'll see what happens to Prince, but at this point, assume Robert Mueller has a nice box for him to live in for a while.

Speaking of testimony to Congress, we now know more about what outgoing White House Communications Director Hope Hicks had to say to Congress herself last week, and it too is a major development: the women who arguably had the closest working relationship with Trump and the classified data he had access to testified that she had her email hacked.

A day before she resigned as White House communications director, Hope Hicks told the House Intelligence Committee last week that one of her email accounts was hacked, according to people who were present for her testimony in the panel's Russia probe.

Under relatively routine questioning from Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., about her correspondence, Hicks indicated that she could no longer access two accounts: one she used as a member of President Donald Trump's campaign team and the other a personal account, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the closed meeting of the Intelligence Committee was supposed to remain private.

Hicks, who portrayed herself as not savvy in matters of technology, told lawmakers that one of the accounts was hacked, according to two sources who were in the room. It is unclear if Hicks was referring to the campaign or the personal account.

Her assertion of a hack raises the questions of who might have compromised her account, as well as when, why and what information could have been obtained. But there was no indication from any of the sources that those questions were pursued by the committee, which had limited leverage over Hicks because she was appearing voluntarily and was not under a subpoena for her testimony or records.

It is standard practice for lawmakers to ask witnesses about phone numbers and email accounts. But it is uncommon, according to people familiar with the committee process, for a witness to tell lawmakers that he or she no longer has access to past accounts.

Of course Hicks's email would be a prime target for spies.  Someone sure has access to it that should not, but then again that's kind of a running theme with this regime, isn't it?

And that brings us to story number three, information that certain people should and should not have access to, as we discover that Donald Trump absolutely likes to grill Mueller's witnesses about what they've told Mueller, which is, you know, indicative of obstruction of justice.

The special counsel in the Russia investigation has learned of two conversations in recent months in which President Trump asked key witnesses about matters they discussed with investigators, according to three people familiar with the encounters.

In one episode, the president told an aide that the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, should issue a statement denying a New York Times article in January. The article said Mr. McGahn told investigators that the president once asked him to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. McGahn never released a statement and later had to remind the president that he had indeed asked Mr. McGahn to see that Mr. Mueller was dismissed, the people said.

In the other episode, Mr. Trump asked his former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, how his interview had gone with the special counsel’s investigators and whether they had been “nice,” according to two people familiar with the discussion.

The episodes demonstrate that even as the special counsel investigation appears to be intensifying, the president has ignored his lawyers’ advice to avoid doing anything publicly or privately that could create the appearance of interfering with it.

The White House did not respond to several requests for comment. Mr. Priebus and Mr. McGahn declined to comment through their lawyer, William A. Burck.

Remember that Don McGahn is still at the White House as legal counsel, while Reince is long-gone as White House Chief of Staff, but the point is openly asking witnesses what they told the feds about the thing you're being investigated for is such a mind-bogglingly stupid thing to do that it should be illegal because it is.

Just so.  Stay tuned guys, the sheer velocity of these new leaks along with the confirmation of leaks from previous stories means things are reaching a critical mass.

StupidiNews!

• A second nor'easter in less than a week is pounding New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, bringing more snow and ice just as residents were getting back power from last week's storm.
• The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does prohibit job discrimination against transgender employees.
• Donald Trump will meet with video game industry executives to discuss what the game makers can do about violent games and children and what Trump believes is a link to mass shootings.
• Health insurance giant Cigna will buy prescription plan provider Express Scripts for $67 billion after a similar buyout attempt last year by Aetna was killed over anti-trust concerns.
• Republicans in Congress are introducing legislation to end state net neutrality laws and allow paid data "fast lanes" nationally after Washington State recently passed a state net neutrality law.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

So remember back in June when CNN fired three journalists over a retracted article that stated that a Russian investment fund with ties to Trumpies was being investigated?  The CNN reporters were fired over not having solid information, but Trump screamed FAKE NEWS for weeks:

An internal investigation by CNN management found that some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published, people briefed on the results of the investigation said. 

The story, which reported that Congress was investigating a "Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials," cited a single anonymous source. 

These types of stories are typically reviewed by several departments within CNN -- including fact-checkers, journalism standards experts and lawyers -- before publication.
This breakdown in editorial workflow disturbed the CNN executives who learned about it. 

In a staff meeting Monday afternoon, investigative unit members were told that the retraction did not mean the facts of the story were necessarily wrong. Rather, it meant that "the story wasn't solid enough to publish as-is," one of the people briefed on the investigation said. 

The reporting about the Russian investment fund and Trump officials was not relayed on CNN's television channels, but it was published on the web and shared on social media.

Fast forward to this week, where the New York Times does get the CNN story correct and gives a whole lot more to add.

An adviser to the United Arab Emirates with ties to current and former aides to President Trump is cooperating with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and gave testimony last week to a grand jury, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

Mr. Mueller appears to be examining the influence of foreign money on Mr. Trump’s political activities and has asked witnesses about the possibility that the adviser, George Nader, funneled money from the Emirates to the president’s political efforts. It is illegal for foreign entities to contribute to campaigns or for Americans to knowingly accept foreign money for political races.

Mr. Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who advises Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the effective ruler of the Emirates, also attended a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles that Mr. Mueller’s investigators have examined. The meeting, convened by the crown prince, brought together a Russian investor close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump’s team during the presidential transition, according to three people familiar with the meeting. 

Mr. Nader’s cooperation in the special counsel’s investigation could prompt new legal risks for the Trump administration, and Mr. Nader’s presence at the Seychelles meeting appears to connect him to the primary focus of Mr. Mueller’s investigation: examining Russian interference during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Mr. Nader represented the crown prince in the three-way conversation in the Seychelles, at a hotel overlooking in the Indian Ocean, in the days before Mr. Trump took office. At the meeting, Emirati officials believed Mr. Prince was speaking for the Trump transition team, and a Russian fund manager, Kirill Dmitriev, represented Mr. Putin, according to several people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Nader, who grew close later to several advisers in the Trump White House, had once worked as a consultant to Blackwater, a private security firm now known as Academi. Mr. Nader introduced his former employer to the Russian.

Hey look, it's our old friend Erik Prince, Blackwater founder and brother of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos!  If  the Times story seems familiar, that's because it should be. The CNN story that got retracted was really the other half of last year's Washington Post story from April on Prince attending this secret early January 2016 meeting with the Russians in the Seychelles.

Now we know who the UAE's broker was, George Nader...and he's cooperating with Mueller over possibly extremely illegal foreign campaign contributions to Trump. Kudos to the New York Times for putting these together.

Prince runs as a fixer for this meeting where money flows to Trump, and his sister ends up in Trump's cabinet.  Oh, and Prince gets access to the Pentagon to sell his latest mercenary war scheme just as the drums of war start up for North Korea.

Now imagine what Mueller's team knows about Nader, Prince, and DeVos, folks.  If Nader is getting a deal to talk to Mueller, the information he has is valuable to his investigation.  That means it's high-level stuff, like say, the Russians sending money to Trump's campaign through the UAE, and expecting things in return.

You know, like conspiracy to collude with Moscow.

Somebody should remind Erik (and all the Trumpies for that matter) that Moscow ties up its loose ends with loose lips rather abruptly.

A former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned by a nerve agent in England this week, the British authorities said on Wednesday, heightening suspicions that the episode was an assassination attempt by a national government, amid rampant speculation that Russia was responsible. 

The development forces the British government to confront the possibility that once again, an attack on British soil was carried out by the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, which Western intelligence officials say has, with alarming frequency, ordered the killing of people who have crossed it. 

In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian agent who was harshly critical of Mr. Putin, was fatally poisoned in London with a rare radioactive metal; in 2016, an official inquiry concluded that he was murdered by Russian operatives, probably with Mr. Putin’s approval. 

“This is being treated as a major incident involving attempted murder by administration of a nerve agent,” said Mark Rowley, Britain’s chief police official for counterterrorism and international security.

Stay tuned.

No Sanctuary In The Trump Era

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has threatened to take legal action against sanctuary policies and the state and local governments that have them almost since day one of the Trump regime, and this week he made good on that promise as the DoJ is now suing California over its sanctuary state laws.

The lawsuit targets three state laws that interfere with federal immigration enforcement and violate the Constitution, according to the complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Sacramento.

Specifically, the statutes at issue restrict state and local law enforcement entities, as well as private employers, from sharing information about undocumented immigrants with federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Justice Department said in the lawsuit.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is scheduled to visit Sacramento Wednesday, and Homeland Security officials have threatened for months to take punitive action against the largest U.S. state over its refusal to help ramp up deportations. Just last week, a top administration official accused the mayor of Oakland, one of California’s largest cities, of sabotaging a federal raid targeting undocumented
immigrants after she issued a public warning about the enforcement action.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra -- named individually as a defendant in the lawsuit -- said local police will continue to work “in concert” with federal agents on issues related to drug enforcement and sex trafficking, but the Trump administration remains misguided in its attempts to encumber enforcement of California laws aimed at protecting its undocumented residents.

“We’re in the business of public safety, not deportation, and we’ll continue to uphold all of the laws, including AB450 and SB54,” he said at a press briefing in San Francisco shortly after the case was made public. “Our track record so far with this administration in court has been pretty good. We’ve proven that California is doing things the way it should, and also proven that it’s the Trump administration that has acted outside of the law.”

Sessions plans to discuss the lawsuit during a speech he is scheduled to give on Wednesday at a law enforcement conference in Sacramento.

“The Department of Justice and the Trump administration are going to fight these unjust, unfair and unconstitutional policies that have been imposed,” Sessions wrote in his prepared remarks. “We are fighting to make your jobs safer and to help you reduce crime in America.”

It's been an ugly fight so far, with Sessions threatening to withhold billions in federal funding from sanctuary cities generating a court fight that's still ongoing, the Trump regime broadly threatening to move ICE agents out of the state while trying to turn ICE and the Boder Patrol into intelligence agencies, and Oakland's mayor informing the city's residents of a major ICE raid in the city last month.

I remain convinced that the goal here is a major Supreme Court ruling that gives the Trump regime broad search and deportation powers that would certainly be used, and one that hamstrings states from protecting the undocumented at all.  Federal courts have long said that states cannot be compelled to enforce federal laws, so that's going to strike out, I hope.  (Remember Medicaid expansion being shot down by the Roberts Court for that reason?)

But such a massive deportation machine may go into action anyway once the detention and arrest infrastructure is built, and new facilities and new ICE and Border Patrol agents are being pressed into service as we speak.  Trump may not be able to make states comply which is why he wants a large enough federal force to make that a moot point.  Alarm bells should be ringing off the walls here.

It won't be long now before such an attempt is made.